


Calendar

by Anonymous



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Culling, Execution, F/F, F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-01
Updated: 2014-10-01
Packaged: 2018-02-19 13:34:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2390180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They’re running out of time, and no amount of diligent dreaming on Aradia’s part is going to change that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Calendar

**Author's Note:**

> The Calendar used in this fic is based on [this one](http://ashkatom.tumblr.com/post/64185736667/for-information-and-the-math-on-how-we-came-up). Please note that by this metric a Perigree is about two nights long, and a week consists of four perigrees.

There is a schedule, self updating and synchronized, that appears on every one of their screens, husktop and palmhusk alike. Black text over pastel backgrounds that change each night with the hemospectrum. They follow it with a religious tenacity that, sweeps ago, would have been reserved for Gamzee at his fanatical worst. A constant thrum of dates and times bounding in their skulls, lashing them together even when they’re all so very far apart.

It ends at 11:59AM, on the 15th perigree of the 6th dim season’s equinox, marking the end of the six thousand and twenty fifth sweep of the eleventh alternian empire. After that, the grid is blank and silent.

Ascension is coming, and it will not be kind to them. One of them will be trapped on the planet, never to leave. Five will be culled for the greater good. Two will have their minds torn out and their bodies left hanging limp and superfluous. The remaining four will be separated from eachother, unable to even mourn in unity, until they have gotten themselves killed, or proved themselves worthy additions to the empire and have a chance to apply for joint station.

Nights disappear behind them, and every one of them clings to the promise, shrinking rapidly, of that schedule.

The first perigree of each equinox, the date is written over a rainbow background, and they pile together into Kanaya’s hive, so far removed from any watchful eyes. Twice, now, these get togethers have turned her sitting room into a technicolor disaster, stains destroying every project she had been working on. She cannot bring herself to care. There will be time enough in the caverns to make whatever she wants, whenever. If she even has wants left to fulfill.

She supposes it's good that she doesn't mind. As the end of the calendar looms closer, she suspects the desperation will drive them to base physicality more often. But just as desperately important are the less starved times, when they are wrigglers having a party, and nothing more. No hungering tongues, no cavernous bodies. Just a dozen trolls, clamouring in her hive, roaming through her moonslit gardens.

When they’re under her guardianship, they move together, a single unit. Their voices cross eachother out, until she is drowning in a rich, indescipherable noise, swallowing it just as Feferi swallows the sea, because a day is coming when she will be left with empty, gaseous silence. Dry, brittle, and so alone.

Until then, she joins the cacophony, hanging off words and shoulders and gazes with a longing that will always be the strongest she has ever known, even after she is crushed by a flailing mother grub, and awakens dead and empty and so very, very thirsty.

There are nights when the schedule is blank, and the background is stark white. Free evenings where they can pretend as one that they aren’t already imprisoned by the future that races towards them.

On nights like those, Equius and Nepeta are rarely found together. Of all their group, they two are most likely to be able to keep eachother whole and close. Neither of them liable for culling, neither of them inclined to revolution. There will be time enough for them to curl together in a shared recuperacoon and softly whisper the secrets of half sleeping moirails.

Instead, Nepeta takes these nights as a chance to visit Karkat, or Terezi.

She scratches her way up Terezi’s treehive, and demands adventure, tracing the alligator smile of her condemned friend, and letting all that fear, all that horror well up as adrenaline that needs to be burned away. They fly on Pyralspite’s back, blazing through the air, chasing down flocks of honkbeasts and diving from the great dragon’s shoulders to claw at feathers and webbed feet. Gravity wins them over, quick as anything, and they cling to eachother, claws driving beads of too-similar blood out of their skin, and the laugh with well earned hysterics, trusting Pyralspite to save them from a death of their own making. To give them the illusion of reprieve, although there is, ultimately, none.

Nepeta prowls through Karkat’s neighborhood, picking silent and predatory through his privacyplants and lawnring, bounding into his home and crawling onto his lap. Sometimes, because the white nights are unplanned, there are others there. Sollux, or Gamzee, or once, memorably, Eridan. They’ve learned to talk around her, as she curls against Karkitty’s chest, fluffs his hair and studies his face from every angle.

No one would ever say it, ever suggest such inequity exists in their chaotic, scheduled lives, but it is a common thought that, out of all the many legs of this quadrant smeared beast, Nepeta’s adoration for Karkat burns brightest. They don’t interupt her study of the curve of his cheek, the texture of his horns, the scars of his oft-chewed lip.

And when she is satisfied that she will never forget the face that she cannot even take a single, blasphemous picture of when she leaves the planet, she rolls off him and declares, impurriously, that they will be having a lawnmeal, and everyone in the hive has to go and catch a meatbeast for her to cook over an incongruous, uncivilized fire in his front lawnring. Fresh, bloodied prey flavoured with smoke and coal, after all, will also soon be nothing more than grubhood fantasies.

Equius spends the white nights in silence, working on Vriska’s arm, Tavros’s legs, Aradia’s side. Even with the great lenience given to him by the press of the calendar, his antiquated, formal speech often leads to arguments and annoyance. Both of which are wasteful, ingracious, unbefitting. Better that he say nothing.

Vriska prattles on loudly enough for them both, as he studies her limb, tests her fingers. Her voice grows more frantic with each hour of examination, every ounce of a lifetime’s lessons telling her not to leave herself unguarded in the presence of someone larger, stronger, impervious to her mind or her voice. By the time everything is checked, she is shivering and taut, and the last half of those nights is spent loosening her shoulders so that her arm can even be reattached at all. Sometimes she chokes on compliments she doesn’t mean to give, about how bizarrely delicate he can be, for such an ugly brute, as he pushes and pulls at her stringy muscles, until everything is limp and loose, and she feels unacceptably safe beneath his claws.

Tavros is much the opposite, in every way. He tries to speak at first. And every time, he is just as nervous as he was at his first fitting. As long minutes pass into hours, he falls silent, relaxing into this space that he can only associate with healing, much as he might prefer not to. Equius is infinitely more careful with Tavros’s mechanics than Vriska’s, double checking every connection, every bolt and wire. If Vriska has learned that she is to be culled, she guards that knowledge jealously. She may well have centuries left to make up for any time lost due to unexpected mechanical failure. Tavros has a fistful of equinoxes before he will be executed for the good of the empire.

A few sweeps ago, Equius would have thought that eminently reasonable. The right decision. Now, drawing careful examination over the surgically precise scars that cross his abdomen, Equius believes- silently, traitorously- that perhaps it is not for the good of anything. He solders wires as gently as kisses, and pulls hinges tight rather than embracing arms, because affection is the same as apology, and apology is worthless here. Tavros still sits next to him afterwards anyway, head cocked at uncomfortable angles so that they can fit their bulky forms together without concussing anyone on his horns.

Aradia is silent from the beginning. Between the two of them, everything that could be said has been, ages ago. At least they know nothing is being lost during the hours it takes for him to unpeel her metal plated neck and tune up her vocoder, or the reach into the cavern of her body and ensure that the welding of the metal struts isn’t coming loose form the blood-stained ivory stumps of what was once her thoracic cage.

It’s better for them both if they practice this silent maintenance now, so that when it keeps happening in the future, it won’t get Equius culled for ineptitude. Better that he accustom himself to working on her unresponsive body while she can still focus her eyes on him, still quirk her red-painted lips reassuringly.

Sollux is explosive, fast and strong and agile, and everyone knows he’ll be installed in a flagship, something that needs to be able to make unbelievably quick trips from the Imperial Ship Condescension to any number of politically expedient locales. Aradia, with her quiet, stable strength, able to move mountains without sweating, but not nearly so bright burning, will almost certainly become a gunship. She will be stationed on the front lines of the eternal expansion. And, of course, the best Shredgineering cadets are assigned to gunships, where they are most needed.

Given Equius’s talent, and his familiarity with her systems, it is all but impossible that he won’t be her rendpair tech. And what words could ever possibly make that any better?

Sollux watches the calendar roll over every midday, because he doesn’t sleep anymore. Not if he can at all avoid it. His blood is half stimulants by now, and if he were going to need to use this body for more than a the ninety seven perigrees left before ascension, that would be more dangerous. But as it is, sleep feels too much like death, too much like the suspension of self that is going to be his eternity. So, he just pumps down more of whatever he can find, and uses the daylight hours to work on every project his addled brain can spit out, desperately trying to scrape together a legacy that isn’t battery, engine, ship.

And when dusk falls, he flings himself almost violently towards whatever the calendar says is his night tonight.

When it’s Aradia, his feet never even touch the ground. She joins him in the air, and they whorl around eachother like pyrotechnics, trains of radiant energy painting circuits across the dark sky. When she starts shaking from the effort of keeping up with him, he snatches her into his rickety arms, and she yells into his ear, over the rush of the wind, where they’re going tonight. Bolting from ruined hive to ruined hive with her body pressed against his own, cold metal and burgundy heat in a cruel patchwork as she recoups her strength so that she can dig and log and decipher.

There are piles of artefacts from the pre-exile ages that will rot on her expansive lawnring, and they always come back with more, collapsing on the grass with heaving chests and shaking limbs, exhausted. And lying there, itching with sweat and dust, swarmed by bugs to chaotic to fly in the orderly dances of his bees, they talk.

Aradia’s monotone, computerized voice spins out fantastic tales of another life, one she swears is happening right now. In that other reality, dying is just the same as sleeping. Her body is whole and warm, and if she wanted to, she could freeze the planet in its voyage around the deadly sun, and give everyone she loves a lifetime or six together, without having to fear the future, because the future is her domain, and she controls when and whether it strikes. And isn’t it just the most wonderful fantasy? It only makes the reality of their situation crueller, but it’s a story that she knows Sollux loves.

Sollux hisses and spits over his own teeth, describing the future that doesn’t belong to some divine super-Aradia. Explains the nuances of so many last seconds. He has memorized the entire script of Karkat’s final night. He knows that when the fork comes down on Terezi’s skull, she will be reciting the Legislacerator’s Code. That Tavros is sobbing without any words at all, gasping as if he’s trying to think of something brave and brilliant, and not managing anything but wet, heaving coughs. That Vriska is so surprised by the declaration that her eye and arm make her unfit that she cannot manage more than shrieking demands, because she’s better than this, better than all these losers, and how could this happen to- and that’s where it ends. He knows exactly how many seconds Feferi’s bloodied, bubbling screech lasts before her lungs and gills go deathly silent.

He lets Aradia be the one to tell everyone else these dangerous secrets, because he is a coward, and he doesn’t want to tarnish Feferi’s hopes any more than he wants to confirm Karkat’s fears. Because she’s so much better at handling Tavros’s quiet denials and Vriska’s brazen ones.

They aren’t happy conversations. But they have them anyway, hopeless and morbid, because at least they’re talking. What they never say is that soon enough, they won’t even have voices.

Sometimes, the calendar is written on black, with vivid rainbow text, and they fall into pairs of squabbling, half-grown adolescents.

Nepeta chases Eridan from the shore to the treeline, yowling about his every misstep while he mocks her feral gait. Sollux bursts blue-hot sparks down Vriska’s scarred spine, guttering out and back in as her own mind fights back. Feferi and Kanaya walk through crowded marketplaces, claws drawn tight on eachother’s sides, mocking their divergent styles. Terezi pins Karkat down just long enough to read him his rights before he puts his greater weight to good use. Equius bellows and lectures and shakes Gamzee, who smiles and stares, and comes out of his haze just long enough to be utterly ruthless. Aradia and Tavros turn six sweeps of partnership on its head, the harsh screech of metal on metal and they find every way they can to prove it wasn’t their fault.

The black days happen less and less often as the seasons slip away.

Feferi never visits anyone's hives but Eridan's and Sollux's, and of course the group gatherings with Kanaya. Instead, she spends her nights with the others at the sea’s edge, because once she’s gone, who’s to say that any of them will ever look at the water again, and shouldn’t they all know what it’s like?

She teaches Sollux to swim. He’s awful at it, but he keeps trying anyway, which is sweet. She races Aradia’s flight out into the open water, dives down into wrecks and comes back with trinkets to her delight. She spears jewelbright fish on her 2x3dent and cooks them at the surf’s edge with Nepeta and lays across Equius’s broad lap, unconcerned with the way his skin oozes saltwater, to stare at a starry sky she’ll never visit. She and Terezi dance on the slick, soaked sand while Vriska sings horrible, filthy songs so loudly that even the waves can’t overpower her voice. Gamzee is a better swimmer than anyone but her, which means that between the two of them, they can wrestle Karkat out into the water against his will  _and_  keep him from drowning.

When she sees Eridan, it’s always at his shipwrecked hive. He hates the water in every way she doesn’t, and he can’t bring himself to explore it’s sunken rooms without her. Even if they’ve both known every inch of the brine filled blocks since they were four sweeps old, it’s still their space. Not his, not hers, but something shared. They curl into dark, cold corners, voices warped by the water, and remember everything they had. She makes him promise to remember what it’s like to be cool and soaked and safe, to listen to her plans for an empire that will never happen and to hold onto the hope that it might. He’ll be the one that knows who she was for the longest, after she melts into foam on the crests of waves. He has to remember, because no one else will have any chance of surviving long enough to ensure that the next little pink guppy actually does win, actually does rebuild the universe in the image of peace.

When she visits Sollux, she drags him to the top of his hivestem, where his lusus used to be chained, long since dead, and they stay there, soaking in the heat and stink of the city as it rises up and up. Cold, dark water is her home, and hot, dry air is his, and she wants to know everything she can about him, before she can’t learn anymore. Sometimes, they stay there even after the sky has begun to turn an ominous, daybreak grey.

Once, she begs him to stay out with her longer, because she isn’t ready to lose this night, not yet, there are so few left now, and they feel their skin prick under the radioactive heat as the horizon brightens further, a manic tapestry of pink and gold, molten and vibrant. She makes him promise that when he’s out there, in that sky, he’ll remember being here with her. Seeing how even the fabric of space drew them together like this. She doesn’t say anything about the way their colors spill like blood, burning them both away.

Exactly twice since they started keeping it, the calendar has blazed the words ‘mental health night’ in stark white across a hemonymous grey background. Those two nights were meant to be spent doing anything other than crawling in eachother’s spaces. Working on projects, thinking about life, coming to terms with death.

Gamzee spends them doing something he never does on other days. He leaves his sopor in the recuperacoon. He lets his head clear just enough to begin to understand what is looming, bearing down upon him like the black aneurysm of someone else’s chucklevoodoos, fear and sorrow scratching at the hollow spaces in his thinkpan. He writes notes to himself that he’ll never read in lazy, sloping clawriting that’s shaky from lack of practice.

They’re all plans, just as shaky, for how to get them all out safely. How to tuck them all away under the blanket of his unbidden influence, like acorns in a nutbeast’s nest. What’s the point of being alive, and strong, and  _dangerous_  if he can’t even keep them safe?

What’s the point of any of them, if all they are is paint.

The cold press of sobriety turns to anger, to unbridled hatred so strong and noxious that clouds of terror roll off him and drive all the little birds and beasts and fish within leagues of him to drop dead of sudden, catastrophic cardiopulmonary failure. Killing them doesn’t help. Nothing helps.

He claws at his own skin, desperate to hurt and rend and ruin until nothing can ruin him instead.

They aren’t supposed to be around eachother, on the grey days. But Karkat shows up just after midnight, eyes wide, hair a mess, spittle flying everywhere as he pants like the hounds of hell ar after him, seeing nothing but the black-blue-violet torment that plumes out of Gamzee’s skull, seeping from the gouges he’s clawed there. Blinded and senseless and against the rules, Karkat finds him anyway, and the rage sloughs away.

What’s the point of it all, if it’s all going to end? But what’s the point in making it worse, either?

They cling to eachother until the next night rolls around, and Aradia and Kanaya pile into Gamzee’s hive to find them. Aradia pries them apart with psionic force, and Kanaya tends with delicate precision to the wounds they’ve managed to put on eachother in their mindless pain.

Karkat can’t bear the thought of setting the calendar to display the color of his shame on all their screens, as he pours over charts and lists, and ensures that everyone has all the time they can get, the sun leaking every morning through his shutters in lethal lances as he works.

And so, there are not red days.

It doesn’t matter.

They all know what color this is.


End file.
